Day: August 5, 2009

DNC Ad Goes After GOP’s Astroturf Tea-Bagger Anti-Reform Flash Mobs

Jon Ponder

The Democratic National Party has released a web ad that unmasks this summer’s Republicans astroturf campaign of deploying tea-baggers to disrupt health-care town halls and other events. The ad exposes the fact that the people shown in cell-phone videos of the disruptions are not the angry constituents confronting their elected representatives they pretend to be, but rather are tea-baggers bussed into the districts to shut down discussion about reform.

While the current GOP campaign seems to be working so far — meaning the visuals from the videos are likely duping millions of low-info voters — the party’s record on astroturfing has had mixed results over the past decade.

From DU: Identities of Brooks Brothers “rioters” revealed

The GOP’s first astroturf action was the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000, when a handful of paid operatives were parachuted into Miami to as part of its campaign to shut down the Bush v. Gore recounts. (There’s a list of the operatives and who they worked for here.)

At the time, the hapless mainstream media portrayed the “riot” as if it were a legitimate outburst of outrage by concerned Floridians. It was just one in a series of successful tactics that helped the GOP abscond with the presidency in 2000, with disastrous results for the country and the world over the ensuing eight years.

[…]

Clear Channel to Palin: ‘No Thanks’

Buck Banks

sarahpalinwink

Despite ex-veep candidate and ex-gov Sarah Palin’s deep-rooted hatred of the media (“Quit makin’ things up!”), she is being quietly shopped around as a possible radio or cable TV show host.

It’s not going so well. According to Broadcasting & Cable, mega-radio giant Clear Channel passed on an opportunity to have Palin host a radio program. The reason:

The main objection to Palin as radio talk-show host is that she would have to hold forth for three hours a day. While some of her recent remarks may indicate a talent for improvisation, anyone who’s listened to Rush Limbaugh or Thom Hartmann or Don Imus or Howard Stern or even Ryan Seacrest knows it’s the rare personality who can blab extemporaneously for 15 hours a week. And relying on callers to get you through won’t help, because as we’ve all experienced, callers-in are usually more embarrassing than compelling.

We think Clear Channel is selling Sarah short. As Trish pointed out recently, Palin’s farewell speech as Alaska governor was, besides being her first non-ghost-written public utterance, oddly poetic — at least when recited by William Shatner. Palin proved that she could string words together in novel ways, unencumbered by grammar, syntax or that pesky bugbear, meaning.

We believe that someone who has spent so much time bashing, trashing and threatening to sue the media should be welcomed into its ranks and promptly fired in the next round of layoffs. Then she’d actually have something to complain about.

Hillary Clinton Just Can’t Catch a Break

Trish

What Kim Jong Il really wanted: a formal portrait with the former president

News from North Korea is always bizarre, but the Bill-Clinton-saving-the-journalists story is the wackiest in awhile. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos said what ruler Kim Jong Il really wanted was some quality time with the Big Dog.

The secretary told reporters that she was ‘very pleased that my husband’s plane had taken off with two young women on board.’

The big break came just two weeks ago during a phone call home when the women said the North Koreans would let them go if Bill Clinton would come to North Korea as an envoy.

“The North Koreans made it clear they wanted a former president, they wanted Clinton,” ABC News chief Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos reported…

All of this must come as a bit of a slap to the head of the State Department. Poor Hillary can’t catch a break.

The story that Bill Clinton was en route to North Korea broke as the secretary of state arrived in Kenya hoping to highlight her commitment to Africa.

Instead, the spotlight was on her husband on a different continent and Hillary Clinton, who had been calling for the release of Ling and Lee for months, was left trying to catch some of the reflected glow from that spotlight.

The secretary told reporters in Nairobi today that she was “very pleased to get the news that my husband’s plane had taken off with the two young women on board.”

I hate to think what late night talk show hosts will do with the statement that Sec. Clinton was glad her husband’s plane took off with two young women on board, but I’ll leave it to them to elaborate.

All of this comes just a couple of weeks after the North Koreans insulted the former president’s wife.

At a meeting of southeast Asian nations in Phuket, Thailand, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman blasted Clinton for what he called a “spate of vulgar remarks unbecoming for her position everywhere she went since she was sworn in,” according to the state-run KCNA news agency.

The spokesman called Clinton “by no means intelligent” and a “funny lady.”

“Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping,” the statement said.

Meanwhile, Il was said to have accomplished his goal: he had a 75-minute one-on-one with Bill Clinton, followed by a two-hour dinner, a photograph of the former president chatting with him, and a formal portrait of the two. Mrs. Clinton, of course, was not included.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

I think that he is a good person, and good-intentioned. But I believe he didn’t serve in government long enough to understand really how things work … He really does not have an understanding of how Congress operates.

— Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), in a radio interview, on President Obama.